Francesco Solimena
1657-1747
Italian
Francesco Solimena Gallery
Francesco Solimena was born in Canale di Serino, near Avellino.
He received early training from his father, Angelo Solimena, with whom he executed a Paradise for the cathedral of Nocera (place where he spend a big part of his life) and a Vision of St. Cyril of Alexandria for the church of San Domenico at Solofra.
He settled in Naples in 1674, there he worked in the studio of Francesco di Maria and later Giacomo del Po[1]. He apparently had taken the clerical orders, but was patronized early on, and encouraged to become an artist by Cardinal Vincenzo Orsini (later Pope Benedict XIII)[2]. By the 1680s, he had independent fresco commissions, and his active studio came to dominate Neapolitan painting from the 1690s through the first four decades of the 18th century. He modeled his art??for he was a highly conventional painter??after the Roman Baroque masters, Luca Giordano and Giovanni Lanfranco, and Mattia Preti, whose technique of warm brownish shadowing Solimena emulated. Solimena painted many frescoes in Naples, altarpieces, celebrations of weddings and courtly occasions, mythological subjects, characteristically chosen for their theatrical drama, and portraits. His settings are suggested with a few details??steps, archways, balustrades, columns??concentrating attention on figures and their draperies, caught in pools and shafts of light. Art historians take pleasure in identifying the models he imitated or adapted in his compositions. His numerous preparatory drawings often mix media, combining pen-and-ink, chalk and watercolor washes.
Francesco Solimena 'A study for the fresco cycle in the Sacristy of San Paolo Maggiore in Naples', Whitfield Fine Art.A typical example of the elaborately constructed allegorical "machines" of his early mature style, fully employing his mastery of chiaroscuro, is the Allegory of Rule (1690) from the Stroganoff collection, which has come to the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
He apparently hoped to see his son Orazio follow a career in the law, for which he received a doctorate (de Domenici), but also became a painter.
His large, efficiently structured atelier became a virtual academy, at the heart of cultural life in Naples. Among his many pupils were Francesco de Mura (1696-1784) , Giuseppe Bonito (1707-89), Pietro Capelli, Gaspare Traversi, and most notably Corrado Giaquinto and Sebastiano Conca. The Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay spent three years in Solimena's studio. Solimena amassed a fortune, was made a baron and lived in sumptuous style founded on his success.
Francesco Solimena died at Barra, near Naples, in 1747. Related Paintings of Francesco Solimena :. | Expxulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple | L Assomption et le Couronnement de la Vierge | Rebecca and Eleazer | St Francis before the Pope | Portrait of Charles VI | Related Artists: Carl Fredrik HillSwedish Painter, 1849-1911,Swedish painter and draughtsman. He grew up in the university city of Lund, where his father was a mathematics professor. Despite severe opposition from his father, he studied landscape painting at the Konstakademi in Stockholm (1871-2), under Johan Edvard Bergh and Per Daniel Holm (1835-1903). He also frequently copied Dutch Old Masters, particularly Jacob van Ruisdael. After seeing the work that Alfred Wahlberg had sent home from Paris, Hill began to abandon his initial approach to form and colour, and he left for Paris in November 1873. His most important experience there was his encounter with the painting of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: 'Corot has discovered a new world, because he has discovered a new way of looking at the old', he wrote in a letter. Other contemporary French painters Hill admired were Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Charles-Fran?ois Daubigny, Jean-Franeois Millet and Theodore Rousseau. From Courbet he learnt how to use colour to suggest the surface texture of stone quarries and gravel hills. In Barbizon in 1874 and 1875 Hill met the Hungarian painters Laszlo Pael and Mihaly von Muncacsy. His paintings of this time, for example Autumn Landscape, Evening: Fontainebleau (1875; Malm?, Kstmus.), are characterized by their dark 'luminarism' and their debt to Corot's later works. George Washington Lambert (13 September 1873 - 29 May 1930) was an Australian artist, known principally for portrait paintings and as a war artist during the First World War.
Lambert was born in St Petersburg, Russia, the posthumous son of George Washington Lambert (1833 - 25 July 1873, in London) of Baltimore, Maryland. The younger Lambert's mother was Annie Matilda, nee Firth, an Englishwoman. Mother and son soon moved to Werttemberg, Germany, to be with Lambert's maternal grandfather. Lambert was educated at Kingston College, Yeovil, Somerset. The family, consisting of Lambert, his mother and three sisters, decided to emigrate to Australia. They arrived in Sydney aboard the Bengal on 20 January 1887. Pier Francesco Guala(15 September 1698 - 27 February 1757), also known as Pierfrancesco and Pietro Francesco, was an eighteenth-century Italian painter active for the most part in the region of his place of birth, Casale Monferrato.
Guala was the seventh of eight siblings of whom only he and a sister survived infancy. His mother died when he was five and he was brought up by his father, Lorenzo, who himself was a painter and perhaps related to the architect Sebastiano Guala.
Pier Francesco Guala died in Milan on 27 February 1757.
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